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Review Essay—The Arc of Triumph and the Agony of Defeat: Mexican Americans and the Law

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Review Essay—The Arc of Triumph and the Agony of Defeat: Mexican Americans and the Law 354 Review Essay—The Arc of Triumph and the Agony of Defeat: Mexican Americans and the Law Michael A. Olivas Richard R. Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality, New York: NYU Press, 2008, pp. 480, $25.00. Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010, pp. 192, cloth $34.95, paper $16.95. Ignacio M. Garcia, White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008, pp. 248, cloth $55.00, paper $24.95. Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009, pp. 330, $24.95. These are salad days for Mexican American scholarship, both by Mexican Americans and by other scholars. The small numbers but persistent growth of Mexican American researchers, combined with improved access to important archival materials and increased collaborative projects, and the rich territory yet-to-be-explored have led to these and other important books about an understudied and fascinating topic: the litigation for Mexican American educational and civil rights following WWI and WWII. Indeed, some of the work has reached back even farther, discovering obscure cases and small case studies, all of which give lie to the suggestion that persons of Mexican origin are fatalistic, unambitious, and docile. As one of many examples, consider the Michael A. Olivas is William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Houston Law Center. He gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Lauren E. Schroeder, Kevin R. Johnson, and Laura E. Gomez. Journal of Legal Education, Volume 60, Number 2 (November 2010) Review Essay—The Arc of Triumph and the Agony of Defeat 355 work of the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote in 2004: [Author Jorge] Castaneda cited differences in social and economic equality, the unpredictability of events, concepts of time epitomized in the mañana syndrome, the ability to achieve results quickly, and attitudes toward history, expressed in the “cliche that Mexicans are obsessed with history, Americans with the future.” [Author Lionel] Sosa identifies several Hispanic traits (very different from Anglo-Protestant ones) that “hold us Latinos back”: mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in “education and hard work” as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to “buy into America.” Profound cultural differences clearly separate Mexicans and Americans, and the high level of immigration from Mexico sustains and reinforces the prevalence of Mexican values among Mexican Americans.1 In this article in Foreign Policy, as well as his nativist 2004 book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,2 Huntington is crudely reductionist and misinformed about virtually all the negative traits with which he paints Mexicans, and he is particularly uninformed about the docility and passiveness of Mexican Americans. Extraordinarily, for a scholar of his stature, he cited secondhand remarks and a self-help book by an advertising executive to prove his thesis. Had he read further and delved deeper into the history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, he surely would have discovered the long history of resistance and struggle against their lot in life, especially in employing unyielding courts to press their case against racist oppression. Even when the courts were hostile and when the state went to great lengths to disenfranchise them, Mexican American plaintiffs and their lawyers have a substantial record of aggressively—and successfully—pressing claims and looking to the legal system for redress. Indeed, even if it had been true that Mexicans were a passive lot, it is an odd and cruel turn to accuse persons so substantially marginalized by the advantaged in U.S. society that they cannot be assimilated or accommodated because they had somehow failed to resist that very oppression. Huntington died in 2008, apparently not having drunk in the deep water of Chicano and Chicana scholarship already published. But more recent works, including these four under review and others, should definitively put to rest the allegation that persons in Mexico afuera—Mexican origin persons in the 1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Hispanic Challenge, Foreign Pol’y, Mar.-Apr. 2004, available at cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/culturalagency1/SamuelHuntingtonTheHispanicC.pdf (last visited Aug. 5, 2010). 2. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster 2004). 356 Journal of Legal Education United States—have simply accepted their fate.3 Although each of these texts examines different corners of the larger tapestry and uses different yarn to stitch, they reveal a stunning portrait of resistance and opposition, particularly in the areas of education, criminal justice, and civil rights. While the works of Valencia, Garcia, Orozco, and Strum draw upon different historical sources and examine different domains, they share an overarching theme: although not well-known or documented in the larger literatures, Mexican Americans following WWI and especially after WWII were better organized and, occasionally, more successful in resisting social marginalization and racial oppression than is generally appreciated. In addition, this history is not featured in the general scholarly discourse of our nation, forming an eerily- evident parallel with the present, when nativism and restrictionist discourse have reached dangerous levels and when white Long Island, NY thugs go “beaner-hunting.”4 3. There is a veritable library of recent works on the subject. Some of the better full-length works include those by Arnoldo De Leon, The Tejano Community, 1836–1900 (Univ. of New Mexico Press 1982); Carl Allsup, The American GI Forum: Origins and Evolution (Monograph 6, University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies 1982); Arnoldo De Leon, They Called Them Greasers (Univ. Of Texas Press 1983); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Univ. of Texas Press 1987); Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity (Yale Univ. Press 1989); Gilbert Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Companion Press 1990); Benjamin Marquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Univ. of Texas Press 1993); George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford Univ. Press 1993); Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Univ. of Texas Press 1987); Angela Valenzuela, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (SUNY Press 1999); Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (Texas A& M Univ. Press 2001); Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez (ed.), Mexican Americans and World War II (Univ. of Texas Press 2005); Marcos Pizarro, Chicanas and Chicanos in School: Racial Profiling, Identity Battles, and Empowerment (Univ. of Texas Press 2005); Laura E. Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (NYU Press 2007); Richard Griswold del Castillo (ed.), World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights (Univ. of Texas Press 2008); Joseph P. Sánchez, Between Two Rivers: The Atrisco Land Grant in Albuquerque History, 1692–1968 (Univ. of Oklahoma Press 2008); Jose A. Ramirez, To the Line of Fire: Mexican Texans and World War I (Texas A & M Univ. Press 2009); Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (Texas A & M Univ. Press 2009). These books are specifically about the Mexican-origin experience in the United States, particularly in the Southwest, and many are more particularly grounded in Texas. Far less has been written of the educational history of Puerto Ricans in the fifty states and D.C. and of other Latino groups in the U.S. For authoritative scholarship on Puerto Rico itself, see Jose Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire (Yale Univ. Press 1979); Ediberto Roman, The Other American Colonies: An International and Constitutional Examination of the United States’ Overseas Conquests (Carolina Academic Press 2006). 4. See, e.g., Michael A. Olivas, Immigration-Related State Statutes and Local Ordinances: Preemption, Prejudice, and the Proper Role for Enforcement, U. Chi. Legal F. 27 (2007). As evidence of racial violence aimed at persons perceived to be undocumented Mexicans, Review Essay—The Arc of Triumph and the Agony of Defeat 357 Given the clearly-documented and lamentable educational achievement of Mexican Americans in 2010, and the longstanding roots of this phenomenon, this long history of resistance will likely come as a surprise to many readers of educational psychologist Richard R. Valencia’s Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality. In a revealing table listing Mexican American school desegregation cases, he counts thirty five such cases between 1925 and 1985, beginning with Romo v. Laird,5 in which a Mexican American family sought the right for their four children to attend a comprehensive “white” school in Tempe, Arizona rather than the “Spanish- Mexican” school these children were assigned, which served as the laboratory school for the nearby Tempe State Teachers’ College (later Arizona State University). While the Romo family won this battle for a single school term, they lost the war, as the school officials began to assign Mexican-origin children exclusively to “Mexican Schools,” on the asserted pedagogical assumption that Spanish-speaking children would only learn when instructed in Spanish.
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